A Tug On My Shorts

Everyday, between twelve noon and three o’clock, Jonathan Schwartz wedges his way into my life.

Not that I mind receiving a Schwartz audio wedgie.

I am on the soft side of seventy, and there is very little myself and others of my age have not experienced. We have “seen the elephant” as an old Army buddy of mine said, some years ago. Some of us have sighted the proverbial pachyderm more then once.

But each day at noon, Schwartz sends me something that makes me go……”wow!”

Like today.

I’m driving down the pike after doing some business in a town an hour or so away. I turn on my radio to Sirius 75, and there’s Arthur Schwartz’ favorite son spinning a song by some sweet voiced woman, who’s name I cannot recall. The song is a Cole Porter tune I have never heard. Never heard……. mind you.

I can’t believe that, first off, and then, I listen….. and the lyrics blow me away. “Some Gentlemen Don’t Like Love”. “……..they like to kick it around.”

I hear this woman singing and I’m smiling. I’m humming and smiling.

And then, immediately after the song is over, Schwartz keys his mic and says, in that dry mid-Atlantic voice. “Here’s Billy Holiday and ‘Say It Isn’t So’”.

Lady Day comes on and her voice, juxtaposed next to the sweet sound I just heard, cuts me like a knife. Every drop of pain and sorrow in her life comes bleeding out of that radio speaker and spills on my lap. It was like somebody punched an ice pick into my skull.

When the song is over, Sinatra begins a song that heals the wound a bit. “It Gets Lonely Early” from his “September of My Years” album.

Enough, Jonathan. You toy with my emotions and I love you for it but I have to get out of the car sometime.

I worked a board and played music for many years in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. It was something I had dreamed of doing all my life. The Army gave me an opportunity to hone my skills and a few months in a trade school in Boston did the rest. I got my third-class radio-telephone license and I found a job back home in broadcasting.

But, things happen. A divorce. Remarriage. Time goes by. You know the song. And I drifted away from broadcasting. It was a bitter-sweet parting.

To this day, I can still smell the studio booth….the rug…the sound-proof tile…the faint whiff of ozone and the feeling of hard, round, black melamine control board knobs rolling in my hands.

I loved the old songs. I combed the attic of the station I worked for and found discarded albums. The Hi-Lo’s, Ella Fitzgerald, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Lambert, Hendiricks and Ross and so many others. I goofed with the color coded “music clock” all the jocks had to use.
At ten after the hour, we played a forty-five from the “red” tagged jackets. At eighteen after the hour we could select from the “green” tagged jackets. And so on. At twenty-two before the hour, we could play a tune of our choice. That was the”yellow” pie wedge. I found a lot of yellow on that clock.

The station manager and music director spoke to me.

“How come were not hearing Bobby Goldsboro and ‘Honey’? Who the hell is Chet Baker and what song was he singing? ‘Everything Happened, or Happens or Something To Me’? That sucks. And yesterday you played some group called ‘The Four Freshmen?’ ‘Route Sixty Six?’ Come on, Rusty (my on the air name, honest to goodness) play the stuff on the clock. ‘MacArthur Park’, and Glen Campbell.” There was silence, and then the inevitable choice. “Or find some other place to work.”

I had a family to feed. So I played the clock.

But when I could, I played the American song book, read George Simon and Alec Wilder and collected albums.

This is the music that defined a generation and put this country on the map musically. Up until Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Richard Rogers and the rest of the magical pantheon , (including Arthur Schwartz) America had been ripping off European operettas and Gilbert and Sullivan.

And then the Golden Age of American popular music began, and with it, those musicians daring enough to tackle the songs. Sinatra, Lady Day, Crosby, Torme’, Bennett, Dinah Washington and the rest.

It’s still being played today.

And nobody does it better then Jonathan Schwartz and High Standards. Catch his show. You will not be disappointed.